An Unkind Review of W. H. Auden's FOR THE TIME BEING: A CHRISTMAS ORATORIO

(And one wants to like anything by W. H. Auden)

Yesterday I finished W. H. Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, which, if intended for the ordinary (in a positive, Catholic sense) faithful, fails not because of its worthy intent – connecting the present (1942) with the time of the Birth – but in its T. S. Eliot-ish confusions.

When we read Chaucer, for example, the obscurity is not intentional; he writes the plain Thames Valley English of his time, and we need notes only because we are separated from his language by 500 years.

When we read a modern poet, though, there should be no obscurity or a need for more than a very few notes. Such turbidity as “Love knows of no somatic tyranny; / For homes are built for Love’s accommodation / By bodies from the void they occupy” (p. 45) annoys the reader instead of enlightening or delighting him.

There are moments when the narrative works, as in this Roman proclamation which surely echoes early war notices from the English government:

CITIZENS OF THE EMPIRE, GREETING. ALL MALE PERSONS
WHO SHALL HAVE ATTAINED THE AGE OF TWENTY-ONE
YEARS OR OVER MUST PROCEED IMMEDIATELY TO THE
VILLAGE, TOWNSHIP, CITY, PRECINCT OR OTHER LOCAL
ADMINISTRATIVE AREA IN WHICH THEY WERE BORN AND
THERE REGISTER THEMSELVES AND THEIR DEPENDENTS IF
ANY WITH THE POLICE. WILFUL FAILURE TO CMPLY WITH
THIS ORDER IS PUNISHABLE BY CONFISCATION OF GOODS
AND LOSS OF CIVIL RIGHTS. (P. 29)

But this excellent mockery of governmentspeak is rare in its clarity. Consider this prose by Simeon, which begins well and then quickly lapses into fashionable 1930s cleverness: “Because in Him the Word is united to the Flesh without loss of perfection, Reason is redeemed from incestuous fixation on her own Logic, for the One and the Many are simultaneously revealed as real” (P. 52).

One imagines this being broadcast via the BBC Home Service at Christmas: “Mum, what’s ‘incestuous?’”

Every time the reader thinks Auden is about to pull himself together and speak sense to the audience, he traipses off to get lost in Four Quartets Lane.

The editing and the preface is by Baylor professor Alan Jacobs, who himself is the very model of clarity in explaining what Auden was trying to do, and gives Auden’s work more respect than perhaps it deserves.